The onset of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 has many of us running for cover, and pessimistic about the immediate future of life after the traumas of 2020 and 2021, but let us not wave the proverbial ‘white flag’ just yet.
For a start, US President Joe Biden this week said that although Omicron is “a cause for concern, it is not a reason to panic.” Also, the World Health Organization has determined that in an unusual quirk of nature, it’s very aggressive, transmissive behavior also dramatically shortens its lifespan, meaning it has extraordinary host mortality, and generally speaking, according to Boston University infectious disease expert Davidson Hamer, “If a virus becomes more able to kill its host quickly, it is not able to spread very far, and a high mortality is not good for a virus that wants to spread.”
In other absolutely positive news, we find that during August 2021, buoyed by the success of their vaccines in the fight against Covid-19, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer initiated an evaluation of protease inhibition, an orally administered anti-viral therapy to be prescribed at the onset of Covid-19 infection, or following exposure to Covid-positive others, with the objective of preventing critical levels of illness.
The Chief Medical Officer and President, Dr Mikael Dolsten said, “All of us at Pfizer are incredibly proud of our scientists who designed and developed this molecule, bringing forth a breakthrough oral therapy to combat Covid-19. As is often the case, it is looking back that gave science the key to unlocking Covid-19 in the first place, with current vaccines created in several laboratories around the world being developed in part due to insights gained from science’s previous interactions with recent zoonotic episodes of SARS of Chinese bat/civet origin, and MERS, which had a Saudi Arabian origin, in camels.
The result of the research and development, announced by Pfizer to the New York Stock Exchange on November 5, is Paxlovid, given the designation of PF-07321332; ritonavir, an oral treatment which simply put, prevents the metabolism, or reproduction of the protease, an enzyme that Covid-19 needs, in order to replicate and become more malicious. It emasculates the protease the virus needs to create its genetic structure within human cells. Without that enzyme the virus cannot replicate, it cannot grow and get stronger, and ultimately, itself, must perish.
The real-life, real-time scenario that Pfizer have put forward with Paxlovid is that within a two-to-five-day window, whether an individual displays the early onset symptoms of Covid-19, or has been in close contact with someone who subsequently tests positive, or has a family or workplace member who tests positive, the individual can take oral dosage of Paxlovid, and be significantly safer. In reality, not only significantly safer, but virtually immune as statistics on primary vaccination offer 90% immunity from infection, while based on its trial to date with Pfizer, Paxlovid reduces the risk of even hospitalization, let alone mortality, by a further 89%, therefore reducing the genuine risk-ability to just under 99%, which truly is a ‘golden bullet’ scenario.
Although evidence is beginning to emerge in Japan of cross-mutation of Covid-19 into oblivion, and of a much less than feared impact upon the African continent, despite Omicron setting many hearts aflutter, the recent chaotic scenes in Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands have ensured that complacency in respect of the pandemic cannot be sustained, and the ‘golden bullet’ cannot come soon enough. We can, and must, trust the science. After all… that’s what got us into this.
